Seth Wiesman has a post leaving me feeling a little bittersweet:
If you have worked with a JVM-based application, you have probably heard the term classpath. The classpath defines where the JVM will search for a given classfile when it needs to be loaded. There may only be one instance of a classfile on each classpath, forcing any dependency Flink exposes onto users. That is why the Flink community works hard to keep our classpath “clean” – or free of unnecessary dependencies. We achieve this through a combination of shaded dependencies, child first class loading, and a plugins abstraction for optional components.
The Apache Flink runtime is primarily written in Java but contains critical components that forced Scala on the default classpath. And because Scala does not maintain binary compatibility across minor releases, this historically required cross-building components for all versions of Scala. But due to many reasons – breaking changes in the compiler, a new standard library, and a reworked macro system – this was easier said than done.
They did it, which means less Scala in the code base. But it also means that you aren’t tied to a particular version of Scala in your own code. I’m happy about it on the whole but it does expose a frustrating pain point with Scala.